Obsidian

Use this for local Obsidian vault work. An Obsidian vault is a normal folder of Markdown files plus .obsidian/ config.

Sources

• App config: ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian/obsidian.json
• Default vault name: obsidian
• Usual local vault path: ~/obsidian
• Official CLI: obsidian
• Vault commands resolve the vault from cwd; run them from ~/obsidian.

First Checks

command -v obsidian
obsidian version
obsidian vaults
cd ~/obsidian
obsidian commands filter=search:

Global commands like version and vaults work outside a vault. Vault-content commands may print Vault not found. outside ~/obsidian. Use obsidian commands, not obsidian help, for CLI discovery.

If obsidian says CLI is disabled:

1. Prefer asking the user to enable Settings -> General -> Advanced -> Command line interface.
2. If you already confirmed the app config shape, ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian/obsidian.json uses "cli": true.
3. Restart Obsidian after changing app-level CLI config.

Read Workflow

Prefer official CLI for Obsidian-aware lookups:

cd ~/obsidian
obsidian search query="OpenClaw" format=json
obsidian search:context query="OpenClaw" limit=20 format=json
obsidian read path="Folder/Note.md"
obsidian file path="Folder/Note.md"
obsidian outline path="Folder/Note.md" format=json
obsidian backlinks path="Folder/Note.md" format=json
obsidian links path="Folder/Note.md"
obsidian properties path="Folder/Note.md" format=json

Use direct filesystem reads when you already know the path and need exact bytes:

sed -n '1,220p' "$HOME/obsidian/Folder/Note.md"
rg -n "term" "$HOME/obsidian"

Report which source you used when freshness or vault choice matters.

Write Workflow

Choose the narrowest write path: